Dismemberment of Kathleen’s Psyche in Joyce Carol Oates’s 'The Rise of Life on Earth'

Postmodern literary texts have been exploring characters that are whimsically strange. The tacit plots in the postmodern textual space enable the writers to construct and manifest the mental space of the characters in the textual world. The Rise of Life on Earth written by Joyce Carol Oates concocts the emotional estrangement of the protagonist, Kathleen Hennessy. Decrypting the text amplifies the unabating efforts of Kathleen to survive in a world that has been portrayed as a larger, repressive and pernicious family. Her masquerade to be a shy, passive and well-behaved girl hides the menacing vengeance that has culminated as a result of abuses and afflictions. Her mental spaces are constructed during the course of narration. This paper purports to scrutinize the fragmented psyche of Kathleen and the conceptual integration of mental space and textual space that replicates both social and individualistic reality and expands the understanding of Oates’ text.

Pragmatics and Semiotics

Meaning is determined by both immanent and transcendent semiotic structuring : it is both conceptual and contextual. The recursion of semiosis makes it possible to understand and theorize this open but non-chaotic relation between minimal, medial, and maximal sign structures and the experiential lifeworld that infuses social systems with meaning and lets cultural, semiosic, and mental content develop as a continuity. Semiotics and pragmatics are interconnected, and their bonds are indissoluble ; if cut off, pragmatics would become a part of psychology and semiotics a specialty of linguistics. The cognitive theory of mental spaces and conceptual blending needed a semiotic and, as suggested in the article, a semio-pragmatic grounding in order to grow out of its initial format as a philosophical daydream. The model explained here shows how situational and experiential contributions intervene in the sense-making.

Dramaturgia współtworzenia znaczeń wypowiedzi scenicznej. Na marginesie lektury Tekstów dla (Starego) Teatru Pawła Demirskiego

The article deals with dramaturgy in the broad sense of the term – as a written creative work and the characteristic feature of human activities: artistic and social. The starting point for these discussions is the publication of an anthology of Paweł Demirski’s theatrical texts commissioned by the National Stary Theatre in Krakow. The book is an excellent testimony to stage creativity because it contains conversations with the author and actors about the stages of work in the performance. The article presents reflections on the dramaturgy of the process of creating a text and a theatrical performance, the characteristics of Paweł Demirski’s writing and the content arrangement in the anthology. Reading this book is a peculiar aesthetic experience and a challenge for the reader. The dramaturgy of the message leads to the dramaturgy of its reception: the reader updates and co-creates meanings of theatrical texts, according to individual knowledge and sensitivity. Aesthetic experience is shaped by combining different mental spaces: it is reading a text / seeing a performance.

Geo-environmental Factors in Three Persian Folk Stories: A Preliminary Study

Stories mirror the essential function of human cognitive activity. In the present preliminary study, we hypothesized that the mental spaces that make up the stories can be influenced by the environmental conditions of their creators. For this purpose, three stories from three different climatic zones in Iran were selected and a content analysis method was used to analyze their components. Results showed significant differences between the mental spaces of different geographic regions in these three stories. This finding could be considered as a step taken to show the extent to which an individual’s cognition and cognitive processing in general and the creation of meaning in particular, is an extension and representation of embodied experience. We have discussed the subject in the framework of narrative analysis as well as cognitive semantics.

Translating meaning as cognitive socio-cultural systems.A conceptual approach to the translation of plurilingualism in postcolonial literary discourse in Portuguese

Recent approaches to language, meaning and cognition contend that par-ticipants in linguistic interaction construct a mental representation of their understanding of discourse on the basis of linguistic expressions, world or experiential knowledge, socially-shared beliefs, and the imagination. Fo-cusing on the implications the coexistence of different languages has for the construction of a cognitive culture system, this paper argues that choosing monolingualism for the translation of postcolonial plurilingual texts impos-es semantic limitations, which may result in a dissimilar, domesticated, representation of the recreated reality. Besides taking an ethical stand, this paper also claims that preserving the plurilingualism of these texts responds to the wish to invite readers to open new mental spaces, where the cognitive system of the translated culture can be located. The analysis of examples from the translation into English of postcolonial texts in Portuguese will show strategies to achieve this aim.

Travelling to the described present: mago-space in the Strugatskys’ Monday starts on Saturday

Fantasy and science fiction genres extensively use imaginary settings and locations different from realistic ones but striving to look real. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, pioneers of the science fiction genre in Russia, actively exploited the potential of both genres in their early tale, Monday starts on Saturday (1964), which combines features of the two space types. The present paper analyses the principles of creating ‘mago-space’ in the book. To do so, we look at the spatial organization of the events involved in the plot and the personages’ ideas regarding space. The research will enable us to clarify the role of space in conveying the authors’ message, which in this tale is quite explicit. We argue that the space changes significantly within the book, accompanying genre transformations and the development of the protagonist. Since the tale uses ‘mental sublocations’ as the main units of spatial organization, each part is determined by a certain type of cultural heritage. In the first part, it is the mental space of folklore and classical literature, in the second – that of mythology and science fiction, and in the final – philosophy and science. Mental spaces that coexist and follow various laws form a narrative which turns out to be a journey to the described present in the variety of its forms.

Fictive Deixis, Direct Discourse, and Viewpoint Networks

This paper proposes a renewed and more textured understanding of the relation between deixis and direct discourse, grounded in a broader range of genres and reflecting contemporary multimodal usage. I re-consider the phenomena covered by the concept of deixis in connection to the speech situation, and, by extension, to the category of Direct Discourse, in its various functions. I propose an understanding of Direct Discourse as a construction which is a correlate of Deictic Ground. Relying on Mental Spaces Theory and the apparatus it makes available for a close analysis of viewpoint networks, I analyze examples from a range of discourse genres - textual, visual and multimodal, such as literature, political campaigns, internet memes and storefront signs. These discourse contexts use Direct Discourse Constructions but usually lack a fully profiled Deictic Ground. I propose that in such cases the Deictic Ground is not a pre-existing conceptual structure, but rather is set up ad hoc to construe non-standard uses of Direct Discourse–I refer to such construals as Fictive Deictic Grounds. In that context, I propose a re-consideration of the concept of Direct Discourse, to explain its tight correlation with the concept of deixis. I also argue for a treatment of Deictic Ground as a composite structure, which may not be fully profiled in each case, while participating in the construction of viewpoint configurations.

Between commitment and certainty

In accord with Verhagen’s (1996) insights regarding epistemic uses of the predicator promise (e.g., Tomorrow promises to be a fine day), this paper identifies another type of these epistemic uses. It focuses on constructional cues in complex-clause utterances of the form I promise X: whether or not the subject of the embedded clause X is congruent with ‘I’ in the main clause and whether the tense of X is past or non-past. It investigates how it is used epistemically, especially in its colloquial uses; how the constructional cues (the kind of subject and the tense information) influence its construal; and how the different conceptual structures underlying the construals of the commissive and the epistemic modal senses of the construction can be modeled within Mental-spaces theory. It also discusses that the conceptual structures may be differently reified cross-linguistically briefing on the Korean constructs yaksokha- ‘(I) promise’ and cangtamha- ‘(I) assure’.